This morning Josh and I headed over to the Kremlin, where another refusal to accept my Japanese ID card as anything other than an absolute sham resulted in us both paying the full price of R350 to gain access into the grounds. It turns out that this didn’t amount to very much more than entrance to a couple of reasonably fancy cathedrals and being told by burly security men to stop walking within 1cm of an empty road with no traffic. Of particular annoyance was the fact that whilst the Kremlin map given to us upon arrival clearly depicted an area marked ‘Secret Garden’, when we tried to enter said area we were resolutely denied by a very officious-looking guard. I managed to resist a sardonic comment regarding Frances Hodgson Burnett, partly because of my lack of Russian, but mostly because of the very large gun.

Only now did I feel truly at home in Russia.

Tonight Josh and I headed out for a night on the town with a few of our fellow hostel dwellers. The evening began by (successfully) convincing dodgy looking Russian ‘club-owners’ that we were more interested in a venue which we could leave with both our wallets and our teeth, before settling on a rather nice cafe/bar/club hybrid called ‘Bilingua’. In spite of the name it was pretty much a ‘onelingua’ venue, but despite the obvious language difficulties, everyone seemed friendly enough, and we were treated to several hours of late nineties cheese, before heading back to the hostel at around 4 am, with both our wallets and our teeth firmly intact. It was just a shame about my dignity, which I left on the dance floor at almost exactly the same point as I had during late nineties, the first time around.